Venezuela Offers Billions to Countries in Latin America

Laid-off Brazilian factory workers have their jobs back, Nicaraguan farmers are getting low-interest loans and Bolivian mayors can afford new health clinics, all thanks to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

OPTIONS ON THE TABLE by Noam Chomsky

In Washington a remarkable and ominous campaign is under way to "contain Iran," which turns out to mean "containing Iranian influence," in a confrontation that Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright calls "Cold War II."

The sequel bears close scrutiny as it unfolds under the direction of former Kremlinologists Condoleezza Rice and Robert M Gates, according to Wright. Stalin had imposed an Iron Curtain to bar Western influence; Bush-Rice-Gates are imposing a Green Curtain to bar Iranian influence.

U.S. Martial Law Timeline

If you know people who still believe in the government, send them this link. The info here should convince anyone that there is a problem.

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Drudge Barks, TV News Bites

Thank you, Matt Drudge, for providing us all with a brief respite from what might have otherwise been yet another ho-hum August day of campaign reporting. Because who cares what candidates are saying about Iraq or Cuba or assault rifles when “OBAMA WIFE SLAMS HILLARY?” (as Drudge casually wondered aloud across the top of his web site yesterday morning). Cat fight!

Drudge linked his teaser to a Chicago Sun-Times column in which a line from a recent Michelle Obama stump speech—”…if you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House”—was referenced sans context along with the suggestion (Drudge bait!) by columnist Jennifer Hunter that it “could be interpreted as a swipe at Hillary Clinton.” Drudge linked. Bloggers dissected. And predictably, Drudge soon saw his all-caps question mirrored back at him from television screens tuned to network and cable news. Some examples:

NOTE: This is how mainstream media operates. Show me a real journalist and I`ll show you an independent or freelance reporter.

America and Venezuela: Constitutional Worlds Apart

Although imperfect, no country anywhere is closer to a model democracy than Venezuela under President Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias. In contrast, none is a more shameless failure than America, but it was true long before the age of George W. Bush. The difference under his regime is that the mask is off revealing a repressive state masquerading as a democratic republic. This article compares the constitutional laws of each country and how they're implemented. The result shows world's apart differences between these two nominally democratic states - one that's real, impressive and improving and the other that's mostly pretense and under George Bush lawless, corrupted, in tatters, and morally depraved.

Did the White House Rig the Stock Market?

Yes, the Plunge Protection Team is real, except its actual name is the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, or PWG. (The nickname comes from an old Washington Post headline.) After the 1987 stock market crash, President Reagan authorized the creation of the PWG—consisting of the Treasury secretary, the Fed chair, and the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, so that top regulators and economic policy chiefs could formally consult with one another in event of a financial crisis as well as prepare a plan of action in case of a financial markets meltdown. For instance, it might advise the president to temporarily close the markets, as happened after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Note: This article proves quite a few conspiracy theories; First, that the Plunge protection team exist, second , that the President is in charge of it, third, that all nations and world banking groups who injected billions ( almost half a trillion dollars) know about it and are part of the conspiracy, fourth, that all these people are working together to cover up their own corruption and/or incompetence.

US-Iran Policy Dynamics

Do we not have the right to invade and destroy a foreign country? Of course we do. That's a given. The only question is: Will the surge work? Or some other tactic? Perhaps this catastrophe is costing us too much. And those are the limits of the debates among the presidential candidates, the Congress and the media, with rare exceptions. That's part of the reason the debates are so inconclusive. The basic issues are not discussable.

The Washington Post’s Bias Against Democracy in Latin America

In the 1980s the Washington Post honed an editorial page style to attack the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua that involved complex and convoluted editorials weaving half truths, total lies, innuendo, and unsupported speculation. These editorials were impossible to respond to with letters to the editor limited to 200 words. The “big lie” strategy is effective because to respond with the truth takes even more words than the original lie.

The Washington Post is now using the “big lie” strategy against the Bolivarian process in Venezuela and its democratically elected president Hugo Chavez. An editorial on August 17, 2007 is a textbook example of this strategy. It is entitled “Cash-and-Carry Rule” with a sub heading “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez cements his autocracy with petrodollars and another push for ‘reform.’”

The US Venezuela Solidarity Network offers this sentence by sentence deconstruction of the Washington Post editorial as a public service to educate serious readers on important issues of US-Venezuela relations and the campaign to derail the process in Venezuela to use its oil wealth for the benefit of its poor majority.

ON BORROWED TIME

HOW DID THIS ALL COME ABOUT? A (bearish) hedge-fund operator, in a letter to his investors, describes how a senior Wall Street marketing director recounted the genesis of the current situation:

"'Real money' (U.S. insurance companies, pension funds, etc.) accounts had stopped purchasing mezzanine tranches of U.S. Subprime debt in late 2003 and [Wall Street] needed a mechanism that could enable them to 'mark up' these loans, package them opaquely, and EXPORT THE NEWLY PACKAGED RISK TO UNWITTING BUYERS IN ASIA AND CENTRAL EUROPE!!!!

"He told me with a straight face that these CDOs were the only way to get rid of the riskiest tranches of subprime debt. Interestingly enough, these buyers (mainland Chinese banks, the Chinese Government, Taiwanese banks, Korean banks, German banks, French banks, U.K. banks) possess the 'excess' pools of liquidity around the globe. These pools are basically derived from two sources: 1) massive trade surpluses with the U.S. in U.S. dollars, 2) petrodollar recyclers. These two pools of excess capital are U.S. dollar-denominated and have had a virtually insatiable demand for U.S. dollar-denominated debt...until now."

These investors then had standing orders on Wall Street desks for any U.S. debt rated triple-A. Through the "alchemy of CDOs" and "the help of the ratings agencies," the CDO managers collected triple-B and triple-B-minus subprime and repackaged them so the top tier got paid out first. Then leverage the lower mezzanine tranches by 10-20 times and, "POOF...you magically have 80% of the structure rated 'AAA' by the ratings agencies, despite the underlying collateral being a collection of BBB and BBB- rated assets."

The letter concludes: "This will go down as one of the biggest financial illusions the world has EVER seen."

And to think it's all played out is even more laughable.

History Channel Fraudsters Pass Off Joke Website as Representative Of 9/11

As part of a catalogue of dirty tricks employed to smear the truth movement in its 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction special, The History Channel used screenshots of an inane parody website and passed it off as representative of people asking questions about the official story.

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History Channel Hit Piece: Dirty Tricks, Malicious Lies, Journalistic Fraud

The History Channel 9/11 special that aired last night was by far the worst hit piece we have ever witnessed, a completely savage, dishonest and deceptive abomination, replete with dirty tricks, malicious lies and a level of journalistic fraud that goes way beyond simple bias.

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Prelude to an Attack on Iran

The white house has told Time Mag, "There will be an attack on Iran".

Iraqi prisoners kept in wire cages

US forces and Iraq's own security forces have imprisoned tens of thousands of detainees without charge in the four years since the fall of President Saddam Hussein.NOTE FROM THE CORRUPTION TEAM: By allowing these people to be imprisoned without any rights you have all given the authorities the eternal right to do the same thing to any one of you.

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Return of the Robber Barons

As the Bush Regime outfits B-2 stealth bombers with 30,000 pound monster “bunker buster” bombs for its coming attack on Iran, the US economy continues its 21st century decline. While profits soar for the armaments industry, the American people continue to take it on the chin.

Will Bush cancel the 2008 election?

It is time to think about the "unthinkable."

The Bush administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.

The GOP strategy for another electoral theft in 2008 has taken clear shape, though we must assume there is much more we don't know.

But we must also assume that if it appears to Team Bush/Cheney/Rove that the GOP will lose the 2008 election anyway (as it lost in Ohio 2006), we cannot ignore the possibility that they would simply cancel the election. Those who think this crew will quietly walk away from power are simply not paying attention.